


the journey and the destination

by cleardishwashers



Category: Ocean's Eleven Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 22:29:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21187034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleardishwashers/pseuds/cleardishwashers
Summary: If it was anyone else, he would be gone the second the job was done. Since it’s Danny, he rolls his eyes and picks up Tess and drives across the country to the New Jersey State Penitentiary.





	the journey and the destination

There are three things that you shouldn’t do when you’re in the middle of a con.

One: Don’t get distracted. This is the simplest rule of them all, yet it’s the hardest to follow. Distractions are everywhere. A pretty girl walking along the beach. A gold watch hanging off a banker’s wrist. Even plain old hunger can do you in— Rusty once knew a guy who turned around from a computer to grab a scone and missed a security guard waking up from a gas-induced nap.

Two: Don’t run a job inside a job. Two concentric circles seem like they’ll work, until something goes to shit (something always does) and the dominoes of the first circle fuck up the dominoes of the second and you can’t fix both at the same time.

Three: Don’t get greedy. Greed leads to backstabbing leads to jail. Danny’s mom always told them, _ “Nobody deserves more than the rest unless they lose an arm.” _ Rusty didn’t really know the effect of greed, until Reuben leased him out to a friend whose son was running a scheme, and their tech guy had demanded more money and the son had shot him dead. Rusty hadn’t run with that family after that.

Danny decides to stay _ fuck you _ to two of these rules on the Bellagio heist, and all Rusty can think is that he’s glad Danny didn’t say _ fuck you _ to the third. If it was anyone else, he would be gone the second the job was done. Since it’s Danny, he rolls his eyes and picks up Tess and drives across the country to the New Jersey State Penitentiary.

He and Tess stop on a California-Nevada border town, and Rusty pulls into a parking lot outside a motel as soon as the sun hits the horizon. If it were Danny, he’d be driving until he couldn’t keep his eyes open. It’s not Danny sitting next to him, though.

“There’s a diner across the street,” Tess says. “You wanna go?”

“I’m guessing you wouldn’t want to subsist off of vending machine snacks,” Rusty replies.

“You’d be right.”

They cross the street— Tess looks both ways, like she’s in New York or Vegas or LA instead of a podunk town whose sun-baked asphalt road is empty for miles— and they sit down on either side of the Formica-topped table, the waitress slapping two plastic menus down in front of them. “I’ll have a lemonade and a slice of your best pie, please,” Rusty tells her, grinning up into her unimpressed face.

“I’ll have a BLT, thanks,” Tess says. She turns back to Rusty. “Didn’t know you were so intent on becoming a diabetic.”

“What can I say?” Rusty tells her. “I’m here for a good time, not a long time.”

Tess snorts, and it’s still elegant and graceful but it’s a lot more human than anything he’d seen of her in Vegas. “Good for you.”

They spend the night in the motel, and after three hours of not sleeping Rusty buys them both Red Bulls and they spend the night watching the shitty movies on the black-and-white TV.

Tess asks him if he wants her to drive. He looks at her like she’s crazy. “What?” she says. “You drove all day yesterday. I know how to drive stick.”

“Do you know how to drive stick like I do, or do you know how to drive stick like Danny does?”

“Ohhh. Yeah, that’s a reasonable assumption. Don’t worry, I didn’t drive automatic until I was twenty-eight.”

Rusty narrows his eyes at her. Her jaw is set, but her eyes are relaxed. He tosses the keys over the car.

Nevada is a dusty blur, and Utah is a Mormon-y blur, and when they stop in Colorado for the night Rusty has been overcome with a wave of longing for the city-choked East Coast. On the bright side, Tess doesn’t skip gears once. “You trust me with your car now?” she asks him, dropping the keys into his hand.

“I don’t trust anybody with my car,” he replies easily.

“Not even Danny?”

Even the air seems to change. “Not even him.”

Tess looks at him over the hood of the Trans Am, and for a second Rusty thinks she’s gonna say something drastic, but she just nods. “Understandable.”

This time, when he hears her tossing and turning in the next bed, he doesn’t say anything. He only manages to fall asleep around two in the morning.

They leave around ten, Tess pressing a coffee into his hand as she slides into the car. “Thanks,” he tells her.

“What went on with you and Danny?” Tess asks, and he chokes on his first sip.

“What?”

“You know what I said.”

“Yeah, well. Forgive me for being a little shocked that my best friend’s ex-wife just asked me if something _ went on _ with us.”

“I didn’t ask _ if, _ I asked _ what.” _

Rusty puts the coffee down into the cupholder and shifts into park. He stares straight ahead through the windshield. “Tess— it’s complicated.”

“Uncomplicate it,” she tells him, and she should seem overbearing but she’s just vicious. _ Born out of necessity, _ he thinks.

Rusty suddenly realizes that she’s become his friend, in the space of forty-eight hours. “I can’t.”

“Do you love him?” Tess asks, and _ goddamn, _ she’s just going for the jugular today.

Rusty’s first order of business is to protect himself, though, whether Tess _ needs _ to be attacking or not. “Do _ you?” _

_“Wh—_ _what,_ exactly, are you asking?” Her indignation almost makes him laugh, because Tess is a force of nature that Wall Street bankers and diplomats and monkey-suited elected officials wouldn’t stand a chance against, but—

“I think we’ve both spent too long with Danny to _ not _ know what I’m asking.”

“It wasn’t a loveless marriage, if that’s the question,” Tess snaps. “Just— can we drive? Please?” she asks, like she was going to say something else, like she wants nothing more than to turn the claws back on him.

Rusty shifts gears, and they peel out of the parking lot without another word. The coffee goes untouched.

They stop for the night in the juncture where Missouri, Illinois, and Kentucky meet, and Tess tosses the now-cold beverage. “We’ll have to get something better to wear,” Rusty says, indicating up and down at their cutoff shorts and T-shirts. His voice runs rough from a day of not using it; at least, he thinks it is— but he’s done the same route from Colorado to the Midwest thousands of times, and whenever he checked into a hotel, he’d be able to become Con Rusty (the right outfit, the right hair, a non-scratchy voice) without trouble. Maybe he’s been clenching his jaw too much or something. “You opposed to Walmart?”

“I packed some of my clothes,” Tess says, as if it’s obvious. _ “You _ can grab something from Walmart if you want. Aren’t you supposed to be the detail man?”

“That only applies to jobs,” Rusty tells her, like it’s sage life advice instead of him not wanting to admit that he’d forgotten about driving five days cross-country with Tess (not three by himself) until the last minute and packed a bag with solely Los Angeles weather in mind.

“Bullshit,” Tess says. “I’ve seen you plan for stuff three months in advance.”

“How do you know that _ wasn’t _ for a job?” Rusty counters easily, and when Tess’s eyes narrow, he regrets saying it.

“I guess I don’t.”

He thinks that he’s messed up, and then when they’re collecting their room key, Tess says, “You’re so predictable that I’m willing to bet it wasn’t, though.”

“Took you that long to think of that one, huh?” Rusty replies, and Tess elbows him lightly.

Two in the morning on mountain time is four in the morning on Eastern time, even though he hasn’t had a drop of caffeine all day. He knows Tess hasn't either, yet there’s still the sounds of a very awake person on the other side of the room.

“If it wasn’t a loveless marriage, then why’re you coming to pick him up?” Rusty asks, knowing full well that he’s leaving himself open for her to twist his words back on him. “You don’t hate him?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Uncomplicate it.” If you’d told twenty-year-old him that one day he’d be echoing the words of Danny’s ex-wife, he wouldn’t have believed you. He hadn’t believed in a lot of realistic things, back then— things like messing up a job because you were hungry, or things like getting shot to death for demanding more money, or things like Danny Ocean getting _ married _ (because gay marriage wasn’t legal, and idiot, naive, hopeless twenty-year-old him had been entertaining some wild delusions).

“It wasn’t _ loveless, _ okay? It just wasn’t— wasn’t the right _ type _ of love.” He hears Tess turn over again, and when he rolls over to face her, he feels kind of like a twelve-year-old girl at a slumber party. “Just— look. You’re supposed to marry your best friend. I _ did. _ And the sex was good, and I just kept expecting the right types of feelings to show up, and then they didn’t.”

“And so you left him while he was in prison.” He’s not a bitter person, but some things sear themselves into his chest even when he doesn’t want them to, and most of those things have something to do with Danny.

Tess sighs, like she’s the one who’s hurting. “I left him while he was in prison.”

“You don’t wanna explain that?”

“It was easier. It was— I didn’t want to have to look him in the face, and he hadn’t been there, and he was the one who had landed up in _ jail _in the first place—”

And Rusty isn’t expecting to sympathize with her, but another thing that has seared itself into his chest is the fact that he _ told _ Danny not to fuck with the goddamn head masks, and Danny had done it anyway. “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Tess says. “So. Hate me if you want.”

“I don’t.” He _ doesn’t, _ not at all. “But you gotta tell him, Tess.”

“I know.”

There’s a pause, and then she says—

“You have to tell him, too, you know.”

“Tell him what?” Rusty asks, even as his heart clenches up.

“I thought we were being honest.”

Rusty stays silent.

“Look, it’s not fair to him.”

“Why? He doesn’t—”

“He _ does,” _ Tess says, “he always has.”

“And you couldn’t have brought this up before?”

She chuckles humorlessly. “I just told you, I’m no good at discerning between platonic and romantic.”

Rusty huffs a short laugh, even though nothing that’s happening is really all that funny. “So what the hell do you suppose we _ do, _ Tess?”

“I don’t know, okay? Just— you gotta tell him.”

“I don’t—”

“Promise me,” Tess says. “Because you— look, I’d kill to be you. You have your feelings figured out, and so does he, and you _ love _ each other, and there’s nothing stopping you except for hypotheticals and your own goddamn cowardice.” He’s never heard her sound like this before— she burns cold, dealing in icy barbs and cutting remarks, but her words are more heated than he’s ever recalled. “Promise me, Rusty.”

“Promise.”

“Good.”

Neither of them say anything. He tries to imagine a world where he and Danny are a _ couple, _ doing couple-y things like holding hands and sharing food and having sex, and he wonders what would happen if he _ knew _ what Danny tastes like, feels like, looks like when he’s on the brink, and then one of them got locked up or _ worse _ and he could never experience that again—

“Good night, Rusty,” Tess says.

“Night.”

He falls into a fitful sleep, where all he can dream about is Danny behind bars, Danny’s face bloody and bruised, Danny disappearing into the mist.

The last stretch of driving distracts him from his and Tess’s conversation, and as the miles between them and last night’s motel increase, he can just barely manage to wrestle the images in his dreams down into something manageable. Dusty country roads transform into four-lane highways and eventually into the car-clogged New Jersey Turnpike, and it’s only when he’s pulling into the parking lot of the penitentiary that he realizes that the journey is _ over. _ He gets out of the car with a tingling feeling in his sternum, and he turns to Tess, who’s still sitting. “You coming?” he asks.

“Tell him now,” Tess replies. “I’ll stay here.”

He can’t find the strength to protest— he just nods, and he walks to the front.

Danny walks out with heavy stubble and a really shitty haircut, and he’s got that smile that’s essentially the Danny Ocean equivalent of grinning ear-to-ear, and Rusty can’t find the words to tell him.

When they get back to the car, Tess is now sitting in the backseat— he realizes that she wanted Danny to sit up front with him, and then he feels even shittier.

They deal with the two bruisers, leaving them unconscious in their car, and after he drops the two of them in New Haven, he takes I-95 and drives until he’s so tired he can’t see straight. He doesn’t even bother going to a motel— just pulls over and locks the doors and falls asleep in his seat.

His phone rings at two in the morning, startling him into consciousness. “Hello?” he says, voice scratchy.

“Rusty,” Tess says, her voice carrying an odd blend of disappointment and sympathy, “why didn’t you tell him?”

“I couldn’t,” Rusty says. There’s a moment where the only noise he hears is the static on the line and the occasional car passing by him, and then she hangs up.

He drifts across the States, and into Europe, and it takes him seven years to tell Danny. “What?” Danny says, his hands frozen on his tie.

“You heard me,” Rusty replies, still lounging against the doorframe of the hotel room (because if there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s keeping up appearances), “don’t pretend like you didn’t.”

“I just wanted to make sure,” Danny says, and then he asks “Can I kiss you?” with a voice steady enough that anyone other than Rusty wouldn’t know that he isn’t anything but calm and cool and collected.

Rusty doesn’t answer, just grabs Danny’s tie and pulls him in. Their lips collide with a sort of lazy intensity, Danny’s arms going up to circle his waist, Rusty freeing his hand from in between the two of them so he can fist his hands in Danny’s hair. Danny is warm against him, his lips parted in a half-smile that allows Rusty easy access, and like everything they do, they’re so effortlessly in sync that it makes his stomach flip a little. He pulls back, devours the sight of Danny with his mussed hair and flushed cheeks and swollen lips. “Took us long enough,” Rusty says, slightly out of breath.

Danny grins that cocksure grin of his, the one that tells Rusty _ that one’s on you, bud, _ and Rusty leans forward to kiss it off his face.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! drop me a line on tumblr, same url as my ao3 :))


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